Baby Talk

We have a relative with three daughters, ages 2-6. Each one has had some sort of speech development problem. The oldest has worked with speech therapists for two years and remains unintelligible more than half the time. The middle one has also struggled mightily, despite seeming to be an extremely bright girl in all things, and was recently diagnosed with hearing loss in one ear. The third also may have something going on with her ears, but in any case, is having a really tough time pronouncing even the basics.

Their experience has taught me that there are a whole lot of reasons a child may have trouble developing speech and that a mom has to be on the lookout. However, the oldest girl is quite healthy and yet has had so much trouble with her verbal skills. But I’ve noticed something about that branch of the family tree: they baby talk. Everyone baby talks–mom, dad, grandparents.

Now I’m no expert, but I do wonder at the correlation between parents who choose to speek to their little ones like humans and an ability to pronounce words. You’ve got to wonder about kids who hear nothing but gibberish all day… well, at least there’s hope that they’ll learn Spanish correctly from Dora & Diego.

Say What?

I read somewhere that toddlers go through the “why” phase at the point when they’re discovering the pleasure of conversation, but before their conversational skills are fully developed. As they can’t think what to say next to keep the conversation going, they fall back on why?, which usually elicits a response. Yet as any mother who has been why’d into submission can attest, this explanation is of little comfort. When calm (ha!), I remember that it is helpful to steer the child on to other ways to further the discussion, “Do you mean how was my day at work?” instead of “BECAUSE” or “FOR F’s SAKE, I DON’T KNOW WHY.”

Luckily, we’ve pretty much passed the incessant why phase. But we’ve moved on to a fresh level of hell for which I’ve not read any clever articles: the “What?” phase. I’m not sure anything infuriates me in the special way being ignored while I’m responding to someone does. Don’t ask then not listen to my response, only to say “what?” when you note a pause in the conversation. Now I realize that there are potentially a lot of responses I provide that may be difficult to understand if you are three, but I swear there are conversations we have in which the word what arises every time I take a breath. I fear my husband may come home tonight to find me a gibbering mass on the floor, whimpering “what? what? what?” Of course Mr. Wise (aka daddy) says it is just a different manifestation of the why scenario and that we just need to be constructive. But I can’t help but wonder:  why, oh WHY?